Kim

I never wore my uniform to the restaurant, but she did, striding up to the double doors of the pancake house wearing a leather jacket with her apron in hand. I admired her confidence; I mean, what if she had to stop and change a flat, or saw someone she knew at the gas station on the way? These things didn’t seem to bother Kim. She didn’t worry over small mistakes in the orders, or when the cook, a cute boy I had gone to high school with—a physics whiz who dropped out of engineering school and ended up full-time at the restaurant--grumbled over unclear orders and our slow responses.

I was working at the pancake house near Concord, a good 45 minutes from home, to pick up some extra hours in the summer after college. I was saving for graduate school, for the English program I would start that January, and I didn’t have much else to do but work. Some days I would work at the pancake house near home, some days in Hooksett when they were short of help. On my first day in Hooksett I walked into a completely empty restaurant and worried that I had made a mistake. Why had they called me in when I was so clearly not needed? Kim came out to the front, menu in hand, disappointed to see that I was not a customer. At the Gilford restaurant, it was common practice for girls who were not needed to go home so the ones with seniority could make some money.

“I can leave,” I said to them both.

Kim and the cook exchanged looks.

“You drove all that way, “Brett said. “Why don’t you just wait and see if it picks up?”

Kim nodded. “It will be good to have another girl to talk to.”

Kim was easy to be around. At first I thought she was older than her 23 years, because she had already had small smoker’s lines around her eyes and always had a suspicious squint in her eyes, but in the pictures I saw of her on the news she still looked in her early 30s at age 42. After I realized she wouldn’t resent me for being there, we got to talking. Kim was saving up for nursing school. She already lived on her own, in her own apartment, while I lived with my parents until I would drive to Illinois for graduate school. I felt young and awkward next to her, and even her flirting with Brett was quick and sharp, like that of a sitcom waitress.

Kim and I had one thing in common: we were done with the past, with high school and college and New Hampshire. We would eat deep-fried potato nuggets on those slow days and talk about what was coming next in our lives, when we would be done with pancake waitressing and finally get to be respected and have careers. Kim wasn’t squeamish, she revealed, when I told her I could never be a nurse because I couldn't stand needles or vomit or blood. She didn’t like writing that much, she told me, when I told her I wanted to study English. We made jokes about customers, even though we were nice to their faces. While we poured drinks in the waitress station, Kim would say she needed a smoke, and then pop some potato nuggets off a plate into her mouth, singing a song from the public service announcements about healthy eating that aired during Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s (“Here munch this, here munch that/ Soon you’re not just bored, you’re fat”). She would laugh at me when I would change out of my uniform into a skirt and heels at the end of our shift, after counting what was probably less than $20 in tips for six or seven hours’ work, but she never suggested I go home so she could make more money.

A couple of times that summer and fall Kim came up to our Gilford restaurant to work, and I was always happy to see her, and I have thought of her from time to time, though we never hung out outside of work, and we didn’t keep in touch. But when I found out she had been murdered last Saturday, stabbed in her bed by four adolescent boys who chose her home because it was remote, and who also seriously injured her 11-year old daughter—a girl who had just watched her mother die--there was only one thought that brought comfort: Kim had stayed in New Hampshire, had gotten married, lived in a nice house in the country, and had a daughter. And she had become a nurse, after all. I picture her wearing her uniform to work, moving through the sliding glass doors of the hospital , calmly dealing with whatever came her way.